: Nofollow: a good thing for SEO or not? I read a while ago, on this site, (sorry, can't find the link), that Google sees anchors with nofollow attributes as paid links and mentioned for affiliates.

@Sarah324

From Wikipedia:


nofollow is a value that can be assigned to the rel attribute of an HTML a element to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of internet advertising because their search algorithm depends heavily on the amount of links to a website when determining which websites should be listed in what order in their search results for any given term.


You should only be using nofollow on links that you do not wish to give "link juice to". This would be due to:


It's a paid link and search engines do not want those links to influence the rankings of the pages they link to
The link has not been vetted by you and may not be a quality resource so you don't want it to be be considered "a vote" as links are often used in ranking algorithms (links submitted with blog comments being a prime example)


So unless those links are paid links you should not be using nofollow on them. It breaks the ranking algorithms of the search engines. Additionally, not only does this not help you as just using nofollow for external links is not a positive ranking factor, but it can hurt you as external links can be a positive ranking signal.

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